Your questions answered on Lambeth's approach
Why has Lambeth’s Supporting People team been awarded Regional Champions award for Governance?
Lambeth has become Regional Champions because of the innovation and quality of leadership it has shown in this area.
A central factor has been the role of our Commissioning Board. The board has taken a highly strategic approach to the development of the Supporting People (SP) programme and has been key in identifying and developing shared local priorities and consensus decision making. It has also overseen the development of a commissioning framework for the borough, which has been crucial for the involvement of local third sector providers. The board has also been at the forefront of driving forward innovative service solutions, value for money, performance benchmarking and joint commissioning arrangements.
The success of this approach means that under the Local Area Agreement (LAA) Lambeth is taking this model of governance even further: the SP Commissioning Board is being developed to provide an umbrella body and a co-ordinating body for the LAA Strategic Commissioning Plan, in line with the Sustainable Communities Strategy.
In a speech in November 2006, Phil Woolas MP (the then Minister responsible for Supporting People) seemed to endorse the approach taken in Lambeth when he stated:
"LAAs are bringing services, commissioners and funds together to the benefit of the local area involved, as partners are able to tackle local priorities and local problems. It seems to us that there are advantages which Supporting People can bring to LAAs, and ones which LAAs can bring to Supporting People. LAAs are very much about partnership and changing that relationship between public service deliverers and the public. Supporting People has done much here too. The Commissioning Body already provides a partnership governance framework, and in some areas one which is strongly linked to the Local Strategic Partnership – the 'partnership of partnerships' at the heart of governance of the LAAs".
Indeed, in May 2007, Lambeth’s SP Team was awarded Regional Champion status by Communities and Local Government (CLG) for its approach to changing and improving the governance arrangements for SP to reflect the emerging LAA agenda and direction of travel for local government as a whole. Lambeth’s SP team is effectively the national champion for governance – an award that comes with a reward grant of £20,000 which is intended to fund as wide a dissemination of Lambeth’s practice as possible across the country and which has seen the team clock up many train miles in attending conferences and events to do just that.
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Why is the Local Area Agreement important to Supporting People?
By April 2009, all Supporting People (SP) grant will be mainstreamed into Local Area Agreements (LAAs). SP Admin Grant will be incorporated into Area Based Grant from April 2008. In future, partnerships’ spending priorities will be decided by the strategic priorities outlined in the Sustainable Communities Strategy and this will determine the content of the LAA and the outcome indicators selected from the National Indicator set. This means that the objectives within SP 5-Year Strategies will be subsumed into those of LAAs/ Local Strategic Partnerships. For these reasons, it’s vital that SP Lead Officers seek to influence the development of LAAs as much as possible from now on.
In Lambeth, we see the integration of SP into the LAA as an opportunity to develop SP services, rather than a threat to them. We feel that there is a good deal of common ground between SP and LAAs in that both aim to promote social inclusion and thriving communities; both focus on effective partnerships and commissioning and look to change the relationship between public service providers and the public. The process for carrying this out – pooling discretionary grants to deliver on a set of shared outcomes – is also familiar to SP teams. SP has always been about jointly commissioning services, but the LAA’s focus on strong connections with a wide range of local service areas gives us an opportunity to make this really work. This is especially attractive in a borough such as Lambeth, which has a large number of short-term services for clients with complex needs. Even at this early stage, the LAA is enabling us to form partnerships and deliver services to socially excluded people in more effective ways.
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What is Lambeth doing that’s different from other Supporting People teams?
A key factor in Lambeth has been that the-then Head of Supporting People (SP), Ann Skinner saw the potential for SP’s involvement in the Local Area Agreement (LAA) at an early stage in the process and has championed its involvement in the LAA’s construction and planning ever since.
We’ve also taken steps that that ensure relevant people can meet and learn from each other. We have involved the SP Commissioning Board from the start and supported it to understand LAAs; we also have a representative from the Local Strategic Partnership (LSP) on the Commissioning Board. In addition, we recruited an LAA Project Manager, funded by the LSP but based with the SP team, with the specific aim of developing an LAA Commissioning Framework. These approaches have enabled us to promote the SP Team’s strategic commissioning framework as a model of good commissioning practice that can be utilised across the whole LSP. In Lambeth, this has also resulted in agreement that the SP Commissioning Board be developed into an over-arching Strategic Commissioning Board for the LAA.
We made the decision to align our total SP budget in the LAA’s Safer and Stronger Communities block. We think this is an important signal to other areas of the LAA that SP is part of Lambeth’s cross-cutting social inclusion agenda and not just about social care. In addition, we successfully made a business case for KPI2 (the ratio of planned vs unplanned moves) to be included as one of the LAA’s 11 stretch targets. This commits the LAA as a whole to improving move-on and has already resulted in increased collaboration between the SP team, partners and service providers.
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Lambeth’s Supporting People money is all in the Safer and Stronger Communities block. Why that block and not Healthier Communities & Older People?
We recognise that, within Lambeth, our programme has services and funding that could be said to cut across each of the four Local Area Agreement (LAA) blocks and we did consider splitting the funding accordingly so that a portion of our Supporting People (SP) grant was aligned in different blocks according to current client group spend. However, we felt that this would be administratively difficult to undertake and seemed like a pointless exercise given that central government was already making it clear that the blocks would be dissolved at some point in the near future.
In Lambeth, the profile of our SP programme – with its high degree of spend on homelessness, substance misuse and offender services – meant that there was a better strategic fit within the Safer and Stronger Communities block than other blocks where we ‘sit’ alongside various community safety, environment and housing outcomes.
Of course, the existence of the Cross-cutting Commissioning Group and our partnerships with other commissioners allows us to maintain a strong awareness of desired outcomes and related activity within other blocks and has not prevented us from, for example, jointly commissioning a service designed to improve welfare benefits take up amongst older and disabled people.
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What mechanisms has Lambeth adopted to actively increase the profile of Supporting People within its Local Area Agreement?
Once the draft Supporting People National Strategy was released in November 2005, it became obvious that the emerging local government agenda and particularly the introduction of Local Area Agreements (LAA) would be of great significance to the Supporting People (SP) programme and we began to prepare accordingly.
We were helped in this process by the fact that the SP team enjoyed a high profile and good reputation both externally and internally. For example, in 2006 the Audit Commission judged Lambeth’s SP programme to be ‘Good with excellent prospects for improvement’. The council’s administration of the programme was awarded two stars out of a possible three. The SP Team was also shortlisted for a Municipal Journal award for capacity building within the Third Sector in 2007.
As mentioned above, the Head of SP also began to prepare for the changes that LAAs would bring at an early point by inviting the Local Strategic Partnership (LSP) to join the SP Commissioning Body to further understanding of the importance of the programme in delivering cross-cutting commissioning. It also helped that an experienced commissioner from the SP Team gained a secondment into the LSP team to work on the development of our new LAA. The LSP also agreed to fund a project manager post to develop the commissioning framework for the new LAA, Lou Rossati, who has been based within the SP Team since Nov 2006.
Since October 2007, the SP Lead Officer herself, Ann Skinner, has been seconded out of her Head of SP role and now acts as Corporate Lead for Partnerships Commissioning for the Local Strategic Partnership, with a much wider remit around LAA commissioning. Obviously, both Ann and Lou carry their awareness of the SP programme and the best practice the team has demonstrated with regard to outcomes-based commissioning.
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